Buy those tickets to bunraku, because The Hunted (1995) is the Greatest Movie EVER!

Click on the DVD cover of the title above to download our review of the film, featuring Sean “Hollywood” Hunting.

Review in a Nutshell:The Hunted (1995) is a movie with an identity crisis. Half of the film is a modern samurai vs ninja drama, a nihilistic tale of men with antiquated values carrying out their ancient war in the streets of modern Japan. The other half is Christopher Lambert being a total goober.

The awesome soundtrack featuring Kodo (the taiko group at the beginning)

How inept Tokyo police seem to be…especially against ninja

How when Lambert fights Kinjo at the end sometimes his punches clearly don’t land, yet Kinjo’s head goes full whiplash

I totally agree:

With your critique of John Lone’s pronunciation: it’s bothered me since I was 15, when this thing came out. Joan Chen’s is much better. Still I always had issues with them not finding Japanese actors for those roles…

I’m surprise you guys didn’t make any comparison to John Frankenheimer’s foray into the martial arts genre that is “The Challenge” (aka Sword of the Ninja… which is ridiculous since the movie had no ninjas as I recalled). The Challenge was amazing since it was shot in around 1984 (I think), featured the titan of Japanese cinema Toshiro Mifune, and managed to shoehorn Scott Glenn into the movie without inducing too much cringe (vs Tom Cruise’s role… okay, the armors were great in Last Samurai, but like most Hollywood flicks I couldn’t tell what the hell was going on in a fight with so many close-ups and excessive cutting). Just like The Hunted or Last Samurai, the purpose of Glenn’s role seemed to be, as your podcast had put it, 1) to feed pork to the asian ladies, 2) to be made fun of by the asian culture, and 3) to be the last guy standing. While I enjoyed The Hunted greatly, The Challenge kept floating into the mind. I found The Challenge to be a slightly better film because Frankenheimer was a master of tension second to done, and the movie had no out-of-place Chinese-accent Japanese. That said, all 3 films, The Challenge, The Hunted, and The Last Samurai, could have done without the gaijin characters. Pork may be great, but not in a bowl of sweet chocolate cereal. Come to think of it, add Raymond Burr and Robert Mitchum in The Yakuza (albeit a much lesser extent… which I think was also directed by Frankenheimer) to the list.